Surprise - US Policy Reduces Trading Volumes AND Liquidity In The US Treasury Market - BRAVO

The US Federal Reserve Bank has been easing quantitatively (QE) for 4 years now, since 2009. Over this period, average daily trading volume in the US Treasury market has reduced from 500bln 10yr equivalents per day to 350bln 10yr equivalents. 350bln 10yr equivs may still seem like a big number...but this is a 30% decrease in trading volumes, and that is a reduction not only in volume, but liquidity. Some readers out there might think"so what?" or "whats the big deal if the US Treasury market is less liquid than it used to be?" The answer rests in the ultimate lenders of capital, and the structure of the Treasury market which is of great concern to participants of this market. Investors (yes, a rarely used word these days) prefer to invest in assets that are liquid, especially when that asset is designated as a "risk free" asset. Liquidity = ability to enter / exit at tight spreads without affecting the market price for the security. The US treasury market used to be the deepest most liquid bond market in the world. This characteristic of the UST market has significantly faded as QE has run its course, and the result is a reduction in actual "investors" of US government debt. This is partly why the US Fed is still doing QE. If the Fed doesn't buy US govt bonds...who will? The value of the USD has been cheapened by QE, and that significantly increases the risk in holding UST debt. Think about that for a moment..the US Fed's actions have increased the risk of holding UST paper. UST paper is supposed to be the "risk free" asset against which everything else is judged. If the "risk" of holding the "risk free asset" increases...how are investors to measure "risk."

I will leave it to the reader to draw parallels to the situation as it is currently playing out in Japan.

#5 is not a "goal" but an unintended side effect.
5) Reduced secondary market net supply while increasing supply of the currency = reduced trading volume = reduced liquidity

I suppose i could repeat the phrase, "when the only tool you have is a hammer...every problem looks like a nail"

Here is a direct example of #5

This week is the refunding for long term UST debt (10yr notes and 30yr bonds).

With the QE induced reduction in trading volume and liquidity, expect the remaining market trading participants to continue selling UST's ahead of the auctions...to "make room" before bidding on bonds in the upcoming auctions (remember, primary dealers are required to bid for their pro-rata share of every auction...so about 5% each). As the US Fed continues to print USD to buy UST, the world incrementally loses trust in the value of the USD. Think of the tipping point (currently taking place in Japan as well).

Of course, there has been talk and speculation of the Fed reducing / ending their QE program. Unfortunately, there is no way for the US Fed to "exit" their QE program. The only exit option is to wait for the debt to mature and swap IOU's with the US Treasury.

The market is a discounting function, in that it discounts future expected values in the current price of assets. This means that ultimately, when the market realizes that the Fed cannot exit its QE position (i'm amazed this hasn't happened yet), the discounting function requires the price of UST debt to drop, yields to rise, and the currency to cheapen. And here is where the Fed holding a sizable portion of all outstanding UST debt becomes both a problem, solution, and problem again.

5) The modern world hasn't figured out #5 yet, however Japan is on the path to experience #5 before the US.

It is hard to imagine life in the US falling over due to financial failure, as happened in Greece and Cyprus. Of course in the US it would be slightly different, as the US can print money and inflate away certain problems. The scary part is when those who have been inflated out of being able to survive get hungry enough to riot...that is when chickens in the US will come home to roost. This is a slowly building phenomenon...it does not happen overnight. And every slowly building phenomenon has a "tipping point."

Back to the markets....

As volume and liquidity decrease with the path of QE, we continue to get closer to the moment when the market actually discounts this reality. This is the only reason US bond yields are as low as they are (the same could be said for European Govt bonds). The market hasn't fully discounted this "non-exit exit." Similar statements could be said about the situation in Spain, France and Italy. Amazing our ability for cognitive dissonance, no?

While this all sounds oddly familiar to a ponzi scheme (the kind that goes along fine until one day it implodes)...the effect today is a reduction in both liquidity and trading volume which has created "volatility gaps" or "bifurcated volatility" This is simply recognizing the path that we are currently on. I don't expect the govt (US, Europe, China or Japan) to reverse course...its just important to recognize where we are on the path.

Here is the real purpose of this article....how should i change my trading strategy to adapt to this new volatility regime?

Until recently, the average daily trading range for 10yr note futures (the most liquid UST security) was 20 ticks or about 8 bps (a tick here is 1/32nd of 1 USD of face). Of course when we say "average" that implies some daily vol ranges are bigger than 20 ticks...and some are smaller. Days with significant ECO data (NFP, FOMC, large duration auctions, Housing data, CPI, ect..) expect larger than average trading ranges and volatility. Days with less significant ECO data expect less volatility and smaller trading ranges. This basic concept still holds true today...but the gap in average volatility between a big vol day and a small day has increased (much like the gap between the rich and the poor). In today's market, a large vol day might see a 12-16bp range...and a "normal" small vol day might see only 3-5bp trading range. 5 years ago, these vol range were more like 5-8bps and 10-18 bps. The result is that during the intermittent "slow periods" the market is extraordinarily slow..and during high vol events, the market reprices so fast that large entities do not have the ability to change their position before the market has significantly repriced. This is what we call a reduction in liquidity. As a small individual trader, you may think this does not have a significant impact on your day-to-day life. But as an investor in the institution (do you have a bank account? do you have a pension fund?...then you do have a stake here) this affects us all as the cost of hedging interest rate risk has significantly increased.

So, as a day trader, how do we respond to this change in the structure of market volatility? It means that the average mean reversion trades have much smaller ranges. If you "need" to make X dollars per day trading...and intraday vol is reduced, then you must therefore trade larger size, with more leverage to make up for the reduction in average volatility. This poses a problem to our internal risk manager. Increased size / leverage on your account means tighter stops in terms of price ranges (for example, risking 5k to make 15k). With larger size you will lose 5k faster if the market moves against you. So, this increases the probability that you will get stopped out, and thus decreases the expected value of your mean reversion trading strategy. An option is to not increase your trading size / leverage. However, with the smaller vol ranges, this implies that you will not be able to hit your revenue targets, and this has caused banks and hedge funds to look elsewhere for their trading / liquidity providing business. This is why trading volatility has decreased...market participants have simply gone elsewhere...which reduces not only trading volume but liquidity.

These conditions are what drive traders (liquidity providers) out of an illiquid market, and into a different, more liquid market. Illiquid Markets tend to be "sticky" when trading volumes are small..and "gap" when trading volumes increase.

So, what is my advice? You could either take your stake, pull out and go find another more liquid venue to trade (FX perhaps?). Trust me....you would not be the first. For the remaining traders...there is still opportunity..but that opportunity comes with increased risk. This is the hallmark of an emerging market (yes, we are still talking about the US Treasury market). This all sounds reminiscent of stories about traders who blew up when volatility "gapped." LTCM is the most famous, but there are numerous others.

To be clear, i'm not advocating traders leave the UST market..i'm simply pointing out that market structure has changed...and in order to survive, we as traders (intraday liquidity providers) must either change with it....or be pushed into insolvency.

So how do we change our trading strategy with this decreased average volatility? We need to be more aggressive. This applies both during the slow mean reversion trading days, as well as the trending trading days. Gone are the days where you can sell a good pop...or buy a good dip. Now, you need to figure out your intended direction, and initiate trade closer to the middle. This of course increases the risk that you will get stopped out if you are making such decisions on a random basis. You have to "know" what will happen next. Does this describe how you "feel" about the US Treasury market?

Maybe it is good that trading for less than minutes is not viewed as needed. If I want to make a long term buy, I can set the price and buy or not based on my price. This minute by minute world of WS or even the millisecond by millisecond world is just a more finite way to shave the retail sheep.

Oh and BTW, the volume you see going is not because inteday liquidity is leaving, it is because customers are leaving. Why play when you cannot have a chance against WS Criminals?

You seem to misunderstand what the free-market function is, and why it is valuable. Allow me to educate you.

Intraday traders (ie...liquidity providers) facilitate the price discovery mechanism..so that assets are priced appropriately for the corresponding risk vs retrun characteristics. Without the traders, there is no liquid market, and no "investor" would be willing to park large sums of wealth in such long term "investments." In Japan, the BOJ has stepped in with their own QE program because nobody wants to buy JGBs at current prices. The risk is lopsided (risk 20 to make 1).

Would you like to invest your life savings for the long term in Spain govt debt today if the ECB was not promising to print Euros indefinitely to purchace the bonds from you if "god forbid" Spain was not able to pay its bills? Of course not...because you fully expect Spain to default on its debt...just like Greece did...just like Cyprus. When you really don't have the money...you really can't pay the bill. The point is that as govt debt moves from risk free to likely to default / devalue, the liquidity providers/ traders that enable institutions to smoothly transfer positions are a necessary mechanism in the economic system. This is why the phrase "free markets are the best path to prosperity" is so popular...because free markets ensure that rational economic actors are able to move capital to the location with the appropriate risk vs return characteristics.

Without the free market...without these traders...pension funds and banks suffer massive losses when govts go belly up...because there is no liquidity...no price discoverry mechanism. Don't forget that YOU are the investor in the banks and the pension funds. So this directly affects your savings, even if you don't know it. The intraday traders enable institutns to scale in and scale out of positions in a smooth fashion....distributing the economic pain of devaluation / default, as well as spreading the economic gain of economic growth and prosperity. This is done thru the process of the free market..and is driven by rational economic actors all acting in their best interest in a complex system. The alternative is socialism, communism, or monarchy. History has proved that power currupts..and absolute power corrupts absolutely...so the only way to limt this corruption is the dissinfectant of sunshine...and in the pricing of assets...the only sunshine is the intraday traders acting in their best economic interests in a free market.

And THAT is why QE is ultimately harmful for a government, and ultimately for that governments population...and THAT MEANS YOU...whether you understand it or not.

In every econmic action, you must ask "who benefits." It has been laid clear here on zerohedge that the political elite shuffle assets to their "partners" while they are in power (Goldman scahs, The Carlyle Group anyone??), because everybody knows that the party stops eventually..so they are "skimming off the top today" in an effort to put something away for a rainy day in the future. Note - you won't have access to those rainy day funds...unless you are part of the political leadership.

As a trader, i don't spend much time working thru this thought exercise, because i feel it is pretty obvious...but apparently there are large swaths of the population that don't understand the mechanism thru which their lives are ultimately controlled. I suppose thats good for the political leadership...they can get away with murder...but its actually bad for you and me.

Thanks for your reply and education. Judging from your ID and depth of reply, I am guessing that you are in the industry and therefore have far far more knowledge than me. You could also be out of the industry and have far more knowledge than me....

I doubt I was clear. I was not implying that government purchases were valid price discovery. My point was not that at all.

I believe my point was that I have trouble seeing any valid price discovery anywhere in the existing process. I always hear that day traders provide liquidity. But I also hear that this liquidity is a mask for manipulation.

The rest of your post including points about Spain & Japan seem to be a result of you going down a path that was caused by my not being clear.

I do wonder that having the US purchase most of the existing bond market is being saved by day trading providing Liquidity? The day trading is tiny compared to the Government purchases so how does that undo the government manipulation? It would seem to just being used to hide the real problem which as you pointed out was they were buying most of the bond market.

"The only exit option is to wait for the debt to mature and swap IOU's with the US Treasury" ??

The Fed buys a 10 year bond, say $100 Million.
When the bond matures the Treasury has to pay principal of $100 Million.
But the Treasury has no cash to pay for it. So it has to sell another $100 Million bond to the Fed to pay the principal. Therefore the Fed now has $200 Million of bonds in its balance sheet, an increase of $100 Million.
I fail to understand how this would be an "EXIT" for the Fed.

'When the bond matures the Treasury has to pay principal of $100 million.'

Say the open market is paying $977 for a 10yr note with 2.5% coupon issued today. The Treasury would need to auction around $102.4 million in face value to cover the principal coming due. It would also eventually need to come up with an additional $25.6 million to cover all the interest payments over the next ten years.

After the auction, the Treasury takes the $100 million in proceeds and pays off the face value of the matured paper the Fed holds. Later, the Fed buys those newly issued bonds via one of its primary dealers, at a slight markup. This is the sleight of hand that keeps the federal debt rolling and growing, the primary dealers flush with riskless profits as well as collateral for leveraged speculation, expands the number of 'dollars' outstanding, and concomitantly erodes the purchasing power per 'dollar'.

'Dollar' is in quotes, because they aren't dollars, they are Federal Reserve Notes. The Fed buys Treasury debt with their own form of debt. Their form of debt has been declared legal tender, good for all debts, public and private. That means you can pay your taxes with their debt that you hold, whether with physical 'cash' or the electronic variety. In other words, Federal Reserve Notes, known as 'dollars' colloquially, are but an obfuscated form of tax payment coupon.

Recall that the Federal Reserve returns all profits over to the US Treasury. So when the deb matures...the Fed and the Treasury just strike a line thru those entries on their respective balance sheets and say "all in a days work."

If you are paying attention, you will notice that this is the moment when the Federal Reserve's "temporary monetary creation via fractional reserves" activity becomes "permanent."

In the same manner, when the US Treasury "pays interest" to the Fed, the Fed just hands that money back to the Treasury to "return all profits over to the Treasury." This is why we call QE "printing money."

So just disregard that memo posted here yesterday STRAIGHT FROM THE FUCKING GOVERNMENT confirming the need for, and intent to, demonetize gold, and the options for achieving that. Christian says there's no manipulation, and he's the fucking man, so hey, nothing to see here, no point buying gold, only the stupid fucking Chinese are doing that, probably just to give it a good home and help the west out.